Monday, August 18, 2008

Good times at ArmadilloCon 30 (which I prefer to refer to as ArmadilloCon XXX, just 'cause it sounds both cooler and more deviant). I ended up spending very little time in the gaming room, but reports are that things went well, and the MIB who helped out is thinking of getting things even more organized next year with a schedule of games to be played, something that has worked well in the past if I recall correctly.

Beyond the game room, the dealers' room had little in the way of games, though one of the booksellers had some old GURPS books, at least one issue of DRAGON from what I consider their best years (roughly 70 to 150 or so), and a few old D&D modules. Ninja Pirate was there with a nice big table heavily laden with games of all sorts, especially big board games and the like. Perusing their selection was an inspiration to consider trying my hand once more at a game of interstellar politics and warfare, something along the lines of a Babylon 5 boardgame. Otherwise, there were lots of relatively contemporary novels and few gems from ages past, old hardbacks from the '30s on up, classics from Howard, Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, and others, as well as the new Paizo collections from those writers.

The panels, however, were the best part of the organized offerings. The first panel the Trollwife and I were able to catch was about world building. John Scalzi was in it, as was Steven Brust. My copy of Jhereg has a publication date of 1983, so Brust has been building worlds professionally for nearly a quarter century now. The guy had lots of interesting things to say and is a great, engaging, and fun public speaker, as is Scalzi. One thing they were both big on is treating the world as a character in its own right, something you get to know as you explore it and watch it interact with the other characters. This is very similar to a lot of bottom-up world building we see in the gaming world, where the GM creates just enough of the world to get the ball rolling, and then adds more as the needs of the game dictate. Another interesting observation from Brust was that readers learn about the world from narrators and that there are two types of narrators: “those who are unreliable, and those I don't trust.” By this, he meant that nobody can understand a world perfectly, and everyone sees the world through a prism of expectations, philosophies, and prejudices.

Now, this is something you can use with players, but you have to be careful about it. They expect the things you tell them as the GM to be reliable. If you tell them, for instance, that dwarves love it when you buy them drinks, and then every dwarf they meet is insulted when the PCs try to buy them a few rounds at the tavern, the players likely to get upset with you. It gets even worse if the rules of the game don't work like they expect, and a high intelligence actually offers no benefit to wizards.

That said, there are some things you can offer as prejudices to the PCs. I like to use the carefully worded caveat “everybody knows”. Most people understand what that means, and it allows the player to decide if their character shares the common assumptions. Another thing I like to do is offer extra information to certain characters. I especially like to do this with elves or other long-lived races. Everyone else knows the story of how the Black Duke fell at the battle of Balen Hills; your character dated a woman who was actually there, and her version of events is a bit different from the others. (Notice also that, by describing the information as coming from another character, I introduce the idea that it is likely colored by that character's personality, expectations, and limited viewpoint. Information that comes directly and unfiltered from the GM needs to be reliable. Information that comes from characters in the world ought to be filtered through those characters' goals and outlook.) Martha Wells was also on this panel, so of course she brought up the multiple points of view different characters could bring to a single piece of evidence.

Brust also suggested using slang, colloquialisms, and the like to really make your world feel real. “Floor it!” only makes sense in a world with gas pedals and the like. How do people say the same thing in a world of muscle power? Or magical transportation? What exclamations do they use? Which gods' names are taken in vain, and how are these curses constructed? For instance, in a world based on the Great Wheel of AD&D 1e, you don't say, “Go to Hell!” There are, after all, nine of them. “Go to the Hells!” or “To the Abyss with you!” makes a lot more sense.

Brust later moderated a panel on creating characters, and he echoed a lot of the same points. J.U. Hall, Kitanidis, Prater, Ward, and Williams took those ideas and ran with them, and they also took lots of comments from the audience on characters that have felt real or were especially empathetic. One of them, and darn it, I didn't write down which one, mentioned three Cs: contrasts, conflicts, and contradictions. To really make a character stand out, set them in contrast to something, such as the setting, other characters around them, or, perhaps most effective, the readers' expectations. A cowardly dwarf, for instance, or a hard-bitten, rough-and-tumble noble might stand out more strongly in the players' minds because they confound expectations.

Conflicts are really the engine of story, and they are instigators of adventures in RPGs. But even small, mundane conflicts can make a character stand out. The Witch of Deepvale is waging a constant battle against the gophers that keep digging up her garden, while Sir Kalivar struggles to find a way to help his poor squire Neville overcome the awkward clumsiness of his growth spurt. These sorts of conflicts might not immediately present themselves as useful adventure hooks, but they do make these characters feel more like real people.

Contradictions are those ways in which characters work against themselves. These are the things they do that they know they shouldn't, or the way their actions seem to contradict their personal philosophies. The upwardly mobile merchant who is trying to prove he's really among the social upper crust but whose taste in art is extremely gauche, or the man of peace who has trouble controlling his temper are simple examples of this sort of thing. As GMs we have to be careful how we use this. On the one hand, it's really the perfect, textured touch that makes a character really three-dimensional. On the other hand, if you introduce it before the character's basic personality has been grasped by the players, the contradiction will only confuse them and make the character seem to be a tangled mess of conflicting desires.

Which brings us to the next point that both panels brought up: don't reveal everything you know. There can be a strong urge to info-dump on your players when you introduce a new location or NPC to your players. Avoid the urge, and keep a few cards in your hand. On the other hand, this does not mean that you sit on cool ideas. If you have a cool idea, try to use it as soon as you can. But more mundane attributes or aspects don't need to be shared right away, if ever. Keep in mind what you want this character or location to accomplish in your game, and use that as a guide when you decide what you need to reveal, and what can remain in the background.

Those were the two best panels for use by GMs, but there were lots of other interesting panels on topics ranging from the physics of orbital mechanics to the modes of urban fantasy. A great panel on military SF had the last minute addition of Elizabeth Moon to the already great lineup of Joe Haldeman, John Scalzi, Dave Duggins, Lawrence Person, Selina Rosen, Steven Swiniarski (aka S. Andrew Swann). For those of us who don't have first-hand personal experience with warfare, Mr. Duggins suggested reading Strategy by Liddell Hart, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Joseph Heller's Catch-22,Haldeman's Forever War, and Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Scalzi added the works of John Keegan and Victor Davis Hanson, both of which I can also heartily recommend. There's probably nobody else in the discipline of military history doing better work today than those two.